Faith Is a Fraud; Godless And Proud of It

By Marshall Sella

Published: December 7, 1997

Talladega, Ala., a town of 19,000 about 40 miles east of Birmingham, is the kind of little world Southern Baptists dream about. Churches, it seems, are on every street corner; their flick-knife spires jut through the humid air, a warning to transgressors. Just about any building can be jumbled or cajoled into being a church. One house of worship is clearly a converted gas station: traces of pump stands are still visible on the concrete out front.

But even in what's called the buckle of the Bible Belt, devout atheists gather for their monthly Sunday social. On the shores of Lake Hypatia, just outside of town, 50 people -- happy pagans from as far as Cedartown, Ga. -- are sitting around in sport shirts and sun hats, as the Alabama Freethought Association enjoys a traditional Southern lunch of cold beef and fried okra. The tables are wobbling with atheistic small talk. A raspy-voiced woman complains that her daughter was accused of being a Satanist merely because the girl was carrying a Stephen King book; a ginger-haired man recalls how seeing Joseph Campbell on TV shattered his faith in God.

Roger Cleveland, 52, a former paper-mill worker and the association's founder, takes a last useless pull on his cigarette. ''Right about now,'' he says languidly, ''the folks in town are sitting in church, waving a book that makes no sense and that most of them haven't even read.''

A few years ago, The Birmingham News published a county-by-county breakdown of born-again Christians, tallying how many Alabamians ''will be damned to hell if they don't have a born-again experience.'' In Alabama, religion is a force in everyday life. There is Yes and there is No, and the people who gather at Lake Hypatia have chosen the narrow road. They're an odd assortment of clear thinkers and contrarians and social misfits in search of comfort and brave souls. For whatever reason that they renounce the God of their community, each of them feels solitary and exposed. ''We get a lot of letters from people who believe as we do,'' says Pat Cleveland, the association's director and Roger Cleveland's wife. ''But they're scared to come out into the open.''

Roger started up the Alabama Freethought Association in 1989 to combat what he saw as the incursion of religion into state government. It has since become what Pat fondly calls ''a kind of big old family.''

Atheism in America is a paradigm of miscellany.

Atheists are not joiners. The prime assertion of their philosophy estranges them. Still, most godlessness is invisible. Lack of faith, in most places in this secular age, is a mere topic of conversation, not a wedge that destroys families and careers. What is decried as heresy in Alabama is genteel intellectual debate in New York -- when the subject comes up at all. Accordingly, it's hard to gauge the number of atheists in this country. A recent Gallup poll indicated that 3 percent of Americans do not believe in ''God or a universal spirit.'' But survey results vary wildly, sometimes pushing into double digits. Polls using the word atheist routinely get low readings; that word is shorthand for ''amoral'' and ''crackpot.'' (One member of a leading antireligion group calls himself an athean, in hopes of dodging the stigma.) Regardless of the polls, there's a sharp distinction between the masses of those who quietly lack faith and the clarion, scarlet-A atheists who will not or cannot hide the fires of their unbelief.

Those committed atheists who poke their heads above the surface are not always without political agendas. Though groups like the A.F.A. will deny this, in part to preserve their nonprofit tax status, organized atheists often wield their unbelief against what they perceive as egregious violations of the Founding Fathers' intentions.

Constitutionally, of course, America is fecund soil for atheism. Even a quick stroll through the Lake Hypatia Freethought Hall suggests the length and breadth of faithlessness in U.S. history. Quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, crusaders for the ascendancy of individual reason, are everywhere you turn. Other portraits are offered as hopeful signs that shunning God is a sound and noble life decision: Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant and Clarence Darrow, each one accompanied by a pithy remark that makes religionists out to be fools or oppressors or both.

In a library off the main room, there's a bust of Robert G. Ingersoll, the 19th-century orator known as the Great Agnostic (and in the interest of full disclosure, one of my own wicked distant uncles). Ingersoll's standing as our history's most renowned infidel was finally eclipsed in June 1963, by a noisy atheist named Madalyn Murray O'Hair. As a litigant in the U.S. Supreme Court case that forced prayer out of public schools, O'Hair gained instant notoriety and was dubbed ''the most hated woman in America'' by Life magazine. Into the 1990's, O'Hair would boast (on scant evidence) that her foundation, the Texas-based American Atheists, was 50,000 members strong. None of them were merely agnostics -- those who doubt, rather than deny, the existence of God. O'Hair regarded agnostics as cowards, lackeys of the middle ground.